I found out about this amazing book, Codex Seraphinianus, while reading a collection of articles by Douglas Hofstadter. It purports (or does it?) to be an encyclopedia of another civilization or world, written in another language that is indecipherable to us. Most of the images are delightful containing all sorts of playful modifications of form from what we're used. Hofstadter compares it to music. I've included some of my favorite pictures here although I would definitely recommend finding it and looking at it yourself. When one browses the internet, the standard refrain is that large university libraries have it, and indeed, that's where I got my copy.
The first image is from the "botany" chapter. Who says plants have to be connected, or only have one root? The second image is from the "physics" chapter indicating a contraption for some physical experiment that presumably makes sense in their physics. The third image is really funny is all I have to say, and so is the fourth, an entry on one of the various tribes that inhabit this other world.
1 comment:
I like these pictures a lot. They're neat all on their own, kind of like how the table of contents in books by Freud seem like poems unto themselves.
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